of that first illness. And I believe it to the full; though we know that mercifully there is nothing we forget so soon as pain. Add to that indefinable and wearing agony the surroundings of a large lunatic asylum—beyond conception the most cruel place for such a malady—with medical supervision merely nominal, where all, with scarcely an exception, are regarded as incurably mad, and simply kept out of the way to save families trouble,—and the pen of a De Quincey would help me as little in the description as my own. I shall, therefore, begin quietly from the beginning.

In these coddlesome and unmanly days of ours it is becoming almost rare to meet, in London life at all events, with a man who is not more or less of a hypochondriac about that unlucky scapegoat of modern times, his liver. It is represented as such an ubiquitous, elastic, and sentient being, that personally I am beginning to disbelieve in its existence altogether, and regard it as a sort of ‘Mrs. Harris’ in the human economy. Since the spread of what I may respectfully call Andrew-Clarkism amongst us, the humourist may find ceaseless matter for meditation at the club dinner-table and at ladies’ luncheon-parties in finding out the exact number of glasses of wine (the quality never seems to be taken into consideration, somehow) which each respective liver will bear, and the relative size of the plate of cold meat (or ‘egg, its equivalent’) which may be consumed with slow mastication. The wine or the one glass of cold water, which is undoubtedly better, must be sipped, not swilled; and the general effect, though depressing, is excellent if persevered in. That it is seldom persevered in longer than Nature will allow, and that the patient after a time rushes to the nearest and best-filled board under the influence of uncontrollable thirst and hunger, and so brings a grateful liver to willing reason, is probably the cause why this modified Sangradism survives so long. The days of alcohol are theoretically numbered, but I doubt if they ever will be practically. In older and simpler times it was known as wine to strengthen the heart of man; and why the temperance doctors, who prove beyond dispute that alcohol is not food, in forbidding it always instruct their victims to resort to a corresponding increase of animal sustenance, is beyond my academic logic. It implies a syllogism as much outside of the domain of our old friend ‘Barbara celarent’ as Macaulay’s famous argument:

Most men wear coats,
Most men wear waistcoats,
Therefore some men wear both.

But the logic of medicine is not as the reason of other trades. I had been thinking of these things the other day when I went to church and heard the dear old story of Cana in Galilee. And no reverent mind will accuse mine of irreverence if I say that, in spite of myself, my thoughts shaped themselves into an epigram:—

A miracle of Love Divine
Changed all the water into wine:
Save me from miracles of men,
Who want to change it back again.

This is a digression, but very germane to the matter in hand. For a long course of inanition on the modern principle, not sufficiently combated by submission to Nature’s clamorous invitations to eat, drink, and be merry, and on the other hand indefinitely accelerated by the fearful shock of a course of German waters, was the prelude to the illness into which I fell.

Never mind with what it began. It has been said over and over again that work hurts nobody, but that worry kills. Home troubles, perhaps, beginning with the death of a very near and dear relation under circumstances of exceptional pain, were in my case the real foundation of the mischief, which grows very fast by what it feeds on when worry supervenes. I had, unfortunately, no necessity to work, became less and less disposed to do anything, and more and more the victim of diet-tables and prescriptions, with all their sad concomitants of dyspepsia and want of sleep, and, as a common consequence, the abuse of that grim and baleful drug, hydrate of chloral. The well-disposed interior will revolt at the very memory of its hideous taste, and fly to warning and remonstrance. As day by day the illness crept upon me, and the weary phantom of Self—and Self from its most distorted and morbid point of view—absorbed at last every thought and every energy, the well-known ‘differentia’ of the illness, the ground was being comfortably cleared for the experience that was to follow. Bred in the careless modern school of indifference to higher hopes and feelings; never an unbeliever, I hope (remembering Dr. Johnson’s saying: ‘Sir, if he is an infidel, ’tis as a dog’s an infidel; he never thought about it’), but practically living the life of one, I was without the one stay and rest which can carry men triumphantly over worse troubles than mine. I had to kill Self as all of us must who would fain rise upon the stepping-stones of the dead giant to better things, before my illness was to bring forth its fruit. I hope and pray that it has done so now.

It strikes me that I am preluding still. But I believe that my experience, thus far, will appeal directly to many hundreds of men; and I wish to warn them fully and fairly—it is my object in these papers to do so—under the present condition of our law, to what hypochondria may lead, if they carry it so far as to bore their nearest and dearest, justly desirous to be amused and comfortable in life.

Let me pass those fearful German waters briefly over. I arrived at Carlsbad one summer all alone and half worn out; and that salubrious spot wore out the other half with generous rapidity. Every morning, in the small hours, when I ought to have been putting on flesh in bed, I drank away at some spring or another a fraction of my few remaining pounds of it, in company with a long train of fellow-idiots. The waters of Carlsbad work as neatly as Shylock would have done; only they require a stone where the Jew was content with a pound. Antonio was an arch-hypochondriac, by the way; I wonder if Shakespeare, who is proved to have been everywhere and done everything, had been to Carlsbad and concealed an allegory? I saw at least three doctors at the place; for my first fell ill, and my second could never remember what spring he had ordered me, being convinced that only one could hit ‘my case,’ and changing it, therefore, every time.

O Karlsbader Wässer,
Wäret ihr nicht besser
Als eure Doctoren,
Wir wären verloren!

So ran an agonised distich I found written up on a rock somewhere. But doctors and waters are much of a muchness, I think. Yearly will Charles’s Bath claim its hecatomb; I know not why. Harrogate is as nasty, and as dangerous. To my mind, of all the poisons distilled out of the bowels of the sometimes harmful earth, these same waters are the worst. Strength and weakness are convertible terms for health and sickness; and that which weakens by reducing maketh not strong. And at this point of my sermon take warning again, ye hypochondriacs, and beware.

I returned from Carlsbad seriously ill, and I grew worse very rapidly. The supposed reaction which is so ingeniously claimed as the result of these nasty drinks—to account for the natural fact that all but the herculean among the drinkers grow steadily worse for some time afterwards, and better again when the effects have passed off—failed to show itself in me for some years. It did at last, no doubt; and I may send a votive tablet to Carlsbad yet. I became, as I said, a bore. I was